The task: to write a piece that could involve children as players singers and composers alongside a professional symphony or chamber orchestra. The solution: a peace-cry for the biosphere in which the collaborative nature of theenterprise is a metaphor for a wished-for human enlightenment to the ways of the natural world. Davies provides five musical elements and five ways of development and uses these to illustrate five branches of life on earth:water-plants trees fish birds and mammals (including man). There is a space for answers from children's instrumental groups and then a larger space in which the children can develop the given ideas perhaps with members of theorchestra. Davies returns as composer to depict through an excess of development creation turned sour. Finally everyone comes together with a unison hymn with orchestra and instrumental groups celebrating the turn of thetide.This work for young instrumentalists children's chorus and orchestra was commissioned by the Association of British Orchestras as the centrepiece of an education project which coincided with the implementation of theNational Curriculum for music in schools in England and Wales echoing similar developments in Scotland and Northern Ireland.Score. Duration c. 25mins.

Par BENJAMIN GEORGE. A beguiling 20-minute work for countertenor, women's voices and orchestra, Dream of the Song, George Benjamin's first work since his ground-breaking opera Written on Skin, was premiered in 2015 by the countertenor Bejun Mehta, the Netherlands Chamber Choir and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by the composer. Employing a reduced orchestra (two oboes, four horns, two percussionists and two harps and strings), the work sets verse by three major poets who spent formative years in Granada- two Hebrew poets of mid-11th century, Samuel HaNagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol (sung by solo countertenor in English versions by Peter Cole), and Gabriel Garcia Lorca (sung by the female chorus in the original Spanish). This inspired pairing of texts creates a rich, melancholy and strange poetic conjunction, expressed most beautifully in the final movement which, overlaying soloist and choir, offers two simultaneous visions of dawn, conceived a millennium apart./ Répertoire / Choeur